By Piyush Pandey | Date: Aug 16, 2021

What is Lean Construction?

Lean construction is a “way to design systems to minimize wastage of materials, time, and effort in order to generate the maximum possible amount of value” (Koskela et al. 2002)

It is the application of Lean concepts in construction business with the goal to create a harmonious production system which produces “right first time, every time” to meet the quality and delivery time promised to the customer

It means that eliminating the causes of waste ie errors at the source, consistently reducing rework, subsequent design and/ or specification changes & solving problems in structured methodology becomes essential in order to satisfy the customer

What are the 8 types of waste in Construction!

  • Defects – any work that needs to be redone, repaired or replaced
  • Overproduction – producing in excess or earlier than required
  • Extra-processing – unnecessary steps taken in a process like rework
  • Transportation – unnecessary movement of materials or equipment
  • Inventory – excess material, storage and handling issues
  • Motion – extra steps taken more than required for the task
  • Waiting – to start the work or for materials, decisions
  • Talent – failing to utilize employee skills and knowledge

5 steps to kick start your lean construction journey

1 Commit to making waste elimination a top priority

Leadership commitment is the most essential factor in bringing a turnaround. When led from the top and by example, it really helps bring change on a daily basis in the organisation

2 Seek employee concerns and create awareness on waste reduction

Involving employees as well as vendors and seeking their concerns helps find the underlying causes of variance in productivity, quality or safety.
When every understands implications of process waste, it helps improve every process and perform efficiently

3 Measure “as is” process & create action plans with commitments

Apply Lean thinking to define the problem, for finding waste, bottlenecks and causes of variance. Establishing check and balances to measure the as is process and create action plans for measuring performance on a periodic basis

4 Increase transparency, communication & accountability through visualization

Visualizing the process, works and daily issues helps create transparency and communication. When employees see the waste, it helps focus on the value adding tasks that result in customer satisfaction

5 Initiate routine huddles at all levels for issue resolution & reliability

When leadership engages people in understanding their problem, resolution, provision of resources and appreciation for good work, it helps improve productivity, quality and reliability of project delivery

For Lean Construction consulting, training and implementation or more details, write to – info@kakoli.in or call 77097-69896